Don't overstate the importance of Jeffrey Maier. Yes, he likely cost the Orioles a playoff game in the 1996 American League Championship Series; but despite how many O's fans recall the incident, it wasn't a pivotal game -- the 1996 Orioles could blame themselves (and the eventual world champions, my beloved Yankees) more than the 12-year old in the right field stands.

Here's how many Orioles fans (judging by the arguments I've had with them over the years) remember the Maier incident: Baltimore, in their recollection, won the first game of the series, in New York (baseball still followed the quaint practice of playing the first game in a playoff series at the park of the team with home field advantage) and was leading in Game Two when in the bottom of the eighth rookie shortstop Derek Jeter arced a fly ball toward Yankee Stadium's short right field porch. Orioles right fielder Tony Tarasco drifted back and as he bumped up against the padded blue wall, just to the right of the "Nobody Beats the Wiz" sign, he put his glove up to catch the downward racing ball. It would never reach him.

Because he has been here before, and because he might be the coolest human being in the world, Derek Jeter tends not to approach playoff games that are tied in the ninth inning with the white-knuckle anxiety of an average person. Take, for example, the AL Division Series opener here on Sunday night, a pearl of a ballgame. Nobody dared blink.

Except Derek Jeter, of course, because these are the Yankees, and there is a fundamental belief Derek Jeter never will abandon: The Yankees are going to win. He has a fistful of ostentatious rings that support his worldview, so not only did he blink, he went somewhere else entirely when Russell Martin's go-ahead home run in the ninth jump-started a blowout inning in the Yankees' 7-2 victory against the Baltimore Orioles.

One in the bank, two more to get to the American League Championship Series and 10 more to go for World Series title No. 28. That's where the New York Yankees stand after they turned a tense eight-inning game into a 7-2 rout with a big ninth inning off the hottest closer in baseball, the Baltimore Orioles' Jim Johnson.

"It's impossible to tell your players to take the emotion out of an at-bat or a pitch or a throw," [Orioles manager Buck] Showalter said.

Showalter acknowledged the possibility of the team's playing tight under the pressure of the game. The Yankees, whose roster includes 22 players with postseason experience, are accustomed to handling the increase in news media coverage, the changing game schedules, the harried traveling.